Intellpuke: This article appeared in the Scientific American
edition for May 2009. I found it to be a very interesting and
informative article on the dangers global warming poses to the planet's
food supplies, and thought it merited a wider readership. I hope the
author, Lester R. Brown, and S.A. don't mind.
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.
One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden
change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in
the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it
fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as
today’s economic crisis.
For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate
probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think
seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of
ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire - and
how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list
of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to
dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might
devolve into chaos - and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!
For many years I have studied global agricultural, population,
environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined
effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point
to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have
resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only
individual governments but also our global civilization.
I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal
with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food
economy - most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising
temperatures - forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.
The Problem of Failed States
Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world
order lends unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the
environmental field are well into our third decade of charting trends
of environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to
reverse a single one.
In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen
short of consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the
2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the
bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near
record low. In response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of
last year climbed to the highest level ever.
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